How Do These Scams Spread?

Having learned what the popular Facebook scams are and how to identify them, the next thing you need to know is how these scams spread.

1. Wall Posts: News Feed is the most common medium of Facebook scams. One your friend is infected, the link and message that is automatically generated by the scam appears in your new feed. Clicking on the link that comes with the message will in turn, infect your account and post the scam message and malicious link on the news feeds of your friends.

2. Chat/Private Messaging: these scam messages and links could also spread through chat and private messaging. Moreover, some of the recent 419 advance fee scams and identity scams make use of the chat and private messaging feature of Facebook to solicit money from the victim’s friends.

3. Groups and Pages: Scams also spread through viral groups and pages which promise something in return for you inviting your friends to also join the group. These will typically require you to invite your friends first before you can join. Sometimes they will also require you to paste a code on your browser or perform a task.

Examples of groups/pages like these are the profile spy group [which promised to release a Facebook profile spy service as soon as the required minimum number of members is met], the group against Facebook charging it users fees and the Facebook free credits group. The massive following of these groups as well as the high level of interest of its members make it easy for group/page admins to spread their scams

4. Rogue Applications: Under the Facebook marketing strategy, third party applications are allowed and can pull profile information from its users. While it’s true that Facebook security teams police these 3rd party applications and shut down those that violates its policies, there are still many rouge applications that still manage to get through. An example of this is the quiz application that requires users to input their mobile phone numbers in order to view their scores.

5. Fake Events: Fake events in Facebook work much like scam groups and fanpages in the sense that they lure participants into performing a set of actions like inviting their friends and posting links on other pages. An example of this is the Get a New Facebook Theme event.

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